The Beginning of Between World

If you aren’t already aware, my first novel The Between World was published in September 2011. To celebrate this exciting milestone, I wrote a blog post introducing readers to the story behind the story. This is another of my favorite posts that I’m dragging across from my old blog and sharing anew. I hope you enjoy the glimpse into what started it all.

Stay tuned tomorrow for Six Sentence Sunday when I will share another snippet of the current WIP, Ghosts Don’t Wear Silk Stockings.

Enjoy!

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I’m looking forward to September with its promise of rainy days and colorful leaves. Kids go back to school, pools across Pennsylvania will close, and we welcome days with lower humidity and cooler temps. I have another, more personal, reason to embrace the unofficial doorway into fall. September is the month I am scheduled to release my first novel titled “The Between World”.

It’s a project over a year in the making that started innocently as a short story I wrote for a contest. The contest challenged us to “write a story about an organization that rescues people. The catch is their organization is a secret and must stay a secret. The leader of the organization starts to care for a bystander. Will this put their organization in danger?”

I brainstormed about the possibilities starting with all the ordinary rescue organizations I could think of … police, firefighters, EMS, etc… but all of those didn’t exactly fit the criteria of being secret. Then one evening as I went to sleep thinking about anything other than the contest an image popped into my mind. His name was Yalen and he worked for a very special organization called The Guardian Angel Rescue Group. Apparently, even Guardian Angels need a little help every now and then.

When I woke the next morning, Yalen was still on my mind and so was his damsel in distress, the beautiful human girl named Nina who wandered aimlessly through her life not knowing that love lurked in the most unlikely of places. It took a near fatal car accident to put the two together and voila, we had sparks. Yalen had no place intervening in Nina’s rescue but he couldn’t pull himself away from her. This ruffled quite a few feathers in Between World by those who believed that Yalen’s actions put their organization at risk. All worlds exist in a fragile balance and one tip of the scales could have dire consequences for us all.

An unusual idea? Perhaps. I won the contest and maybe I should have been content enough with that and moved on to other writing projects. Not so easy. Yalen and Nina wouldn’t let me go. I played around with ideas to expand the short story into a novel and used November’s Nanowrimo as a springboard to develop the story.

Fast forward to the beginning of 2011. I scratched my Nanowrimo attempt and went back to square one by plotting and outlining on twenty-eight index cards until I finally had a proper beginning, middle, and end. Then I started all over again with chapter one.

Now after a lot of writing and rewriting, it is my hope that you will enjoy reading Nina and Yalen’s journey just as much as I have enjoyed creating it.

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If you are interested in purchasing The Between World, please visit “My Books” to learn more…